Discussion Response 8A

Respond to the discussion post below with YOUR educated opinion in 3-4 sentences WITH scholarly source backing it up:

The balanced scorecard is a set of performance targets and results that show an organization’s performance in meeting its objectives to its stakeholders. It is a management tool that recognizes organizational responsibility to different stakeholder groups, such as employees, suppliers, customers, business partners, the community, and shareholders. Often different stakeholders have different needs or desires that the managers of the organization must balance. The concept of a balanced scorecard is to measure how well the organization is doing in view of those competing stakeholder concerns. In a balanced scorecard environment, the issue with relevant decision making is not just having any set of information available but having information that is strategic. A performance measurement system must tie to organizational strategy so that employees will want to pursue the organization’s objectives. The scorecard presents managers with four different perspectives from which to choose measures. It complements traditional financial indicators with measures of performance for customers, internal processes, and innovation and improvement activities. These measures differ from those traditionally used by companies in a few important ways. Clearly, many companies already have myriad operational and physical measures for local activities. But these local measures are bottom-up and derived from ad hoc processes. The scorecard’s measures, on the other hand, are grounded in an organization’s strategic objectives and competitive demands. And, by requiring managers to select a limited number of critical indicators within each of the four perspectives, the scorecard helps focus this strategic vision.